


The Dangerous Girl's Guide to Love

by forgosa, littlecorncob



Category: Hard Candy (2006)
Genre: F/F, Misses Clause Challenge
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-25
Updated: 2014-12-25
Packaged: 2018-03-02 10:32:12
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,830
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2809172
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/forgosa/pseuds/forgosa, https://archiveofourown.org/users/littlecorncob/pseuds/littlecorncob
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Post movie. Where things should fall apart, they come together.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Dangerous Girl's Guide to Love

**Author's Note:**

  * For [musesrundeep](https://archiveofourown.org/users/musesrundeep/gifts).



It feels like a rain-approaching ache in her bones, like the crackle of an imminent electrical storm, but she always makes herself sit on it for a few days. This time it’s out of both habit and necessity; it’s her first week, and she crowds in the corridor outside the lecture theatre with the other grey-faced freshmen unlucky enough to be in the eight o’clock class on the first day of the semester. They clutch coffees and phones, a few weary words floating on the air. Hayley keeps to the side, watches the time tick by on her watch, the silver hands creeping towards the hour. The TA lets them all in, finally, leaving them to mill about the desks and stairs. She had waited out the rush and was left with a smattering of seats to choose from: up the back, near a pillar, where the slackers would sit and burn time on their phones, or right up the front, under the eye of the professor and the bored TA, trying to boot the lecture theater computer and tapping his pen against his teeth, eyes glazed. No one notices the girl sitting in the front row, short enough not to bother anyone in the row behind her. Flying under the radar is a honed skill. She’s happy not to shine here.

Her notebook looks unusual next to the MacBooks and tablets peppering the room. Criminology 101 is a huge lecture group, with four or five TAs filing in. She wishes that she had brought her laptop, but it was too early in the morning to wrestle with her VPN and the college’s network. She’d been up half the night on Tor, and she was sure that if she closed her eyes she’d see some of that reflected on her own skin. Her eyes slip shut anyway, finger tapping against the edge of the notebook. She rolls her head on her neck, still trying to ignore the lightning strikes at the back of her brain, the finger-curling impulse to _do_.

“Are you lactose intolerant?”

Her eyes fly open. There’s a tall blonde girl standing in front of her, two Starbucks cups in her hands.

“What?” Hayley says.

“They made the first one with milk,” she says, and holds it out to Hayley. “They gave it to me anyway. Well, I asked for it. I thought someone wouldn’t mind a hazelnut macchiato.”

Hayley takes it, wraps her hands around the paper of the cup, the warmth creeping out into her hands. The girl sits down next to her, and Hayley sees the name on the cup - Laura. She has a MacBook too, sets it up next to her coffee.

“Can you get on the wifi here?” she asks. “I tried before, but I’m hopeless with computers.”

Hayley leans over; she’s not that familiar with Macs, her home setup runs on UNIX, but it only takes a couple seconds for her to get to the login page for the college.

“Wow,” Laura says. She types in her details, and Hayley sees her full name: Laura Schaeffer. It seems like it should be familiar, something tugging at her, but it passes. Laura catches her sneaking a glance, and Hayley covers it with a smile.

“I’m Hayley,” she says. “I’m hoping to go into computer forensics.”

“Wow,” Laura says. “That sounds amazing. Thanks for your help.”

“Thanks for the latte,” she says.

“An equal exchange, then,” Laura says, and tips her coffee in Hayley’s direction. “Cheers.”

The professor comes in after that, a severe woman who stops their chatting with a look. The first lecture goes for a few hours, they get separated into groups with their TAs, Laura grabbing her arm gently to make sure they get placed together. _I’m clingy_ , she says. _You’re my first college friend_. Hayley puts her number into Laura’s iPhone; she has one of those pink cases with bunny ears. Laura is flummoxed by Hayley’s rooted Android phone, and although Hayley thinks that their acquaintance will probably fall by the wayside, when she’s halfway to her next class, her phone chimes; Laura has texted her a pink-cheeked, smiling emoji.

 

*

 

Sometimes it feels like she’s going to split in two. She sees Laura on Mondays, and they text all through the week. She’s surprised, but not confused, about how Hayley doesn’t have a Facebook, or an Instagram, but she introduces her to LINE app, so that they don’t damage their texting plans, and sometimes when Hayley’s in the darkest of dark places on the internet, she’ll find that Laura has texted her a cute sticker, or a selfie of her with a strawberry milkshake at their favourite on-campus cafe. _Study group of one is lonely_ , the caption says, a pouting face afterwards. Hayley grabs her jacket and her bag of textbooks, and walks the ten minutes from her apartment to campus. Laura lives in the dorm, in a single, and although she’s never been there, she’s seen enough of it from the photos of nail polish and selfies that Laura sends when they’re both working through the brick of a textbook that came with Criminology, a suspiciously diverse photo of laughing students on the front.

Hayley’s a bit jittery, on-edge, and angry; her normal state of mind after doing what she does, her hands nervous and cold, under her nails is purple. Laura has her back to the door when Haley comes in, one hand curled in her long ponytail. She’s wearing the glasses she only wears to study, and she’s chewing on the straw of the milkshake, her pen tapping against the page. Haley pauses in the door. It’s strange to see her friend from this angle, the back of her neck exposed to the little curling hairs that have escaped her ponytail. There are two boys sitting in the next booth, and they’re staring at her too. Hayley ignores them, and goes to order a coffee. She’s waiting for them to call her name when she overhears them talking.

“Dude, when I heard Laura Shaeffer was going to this school, no one told me she’d be hot,” one says. She says Laura’s hand in her ponytail go still, and slide down to her table. Her back goes stiff, and straight.

“Don’t even go there, dude,” the other guy says. “You’ll end up like her dad.”

They both laugh. Laura’s hand is clenched into a fist on the table, and her posture is stiff. Hayley’s blood fizzes, lightning crackles on the back of her neck. She goes to the boy’s table, grabs the water carafe and splashes it over them. She casts a shadow over them, power gathered up in her skin.

“Get the fuck out of here,” she says, and he flinches back, water dripping from his eyelashes like tears. “Fuck off,” she hisses at them, and they go, one after the other, not with speed, but shame.

They call her name for her coffee, then, and the barista is pretending not to have noticed the commotion. She’s probably not paid enough to care.

Hayley doesn’t know what she’s going to see on Laura’s face. She balances her cappuccino on the saucer as she comes around the table. Laura isn’t crying, or upset; there’s a bitter resignation on her face that turns Hayley cold. Jeff is somewhere just out of sight, laughing.

“You don’t know me, do you?” Laura says.

She doesn’t know what to say. This is so far from her comfort zone, even though her comfort zone is terrifying.

“It’s okay,” Laura says. “I know you’re not from around here. But I am.”

She hadn’t thought about it. Laura knew the best places to eat, the hidden coffee shops, a tiny diner that she’d lead Hayley to at two in the morning after they’d been cramming all day. She just seemed like the type of person to somehow know the secrets of whatever place she inhabited. But she’d never mentioned any places of significance, never introduced her to friends from the area. Hayley had chosen her college based on distance, if she was honest, somewhere to escape the lingering chill of Jeff, like someone slipping an ice cube down the back of her shirt. She thought she’d seen him once. Once. She’d been very careful, after all.

“I’m surprised you haven’t googled me,” Laura says, and laughed.

“You’re my friend,” Hayley says. Laura stops laughing.

“Sorry,” she says. She leans closer across the booth. “I shot my father when I was twelve.” Her voice is low, calm. Hayley schools her reaction, sweat pricking at her armpits and hairline. She stirs her cappuccino, the chocolate on top dissolving into the foam. “Self defense,” Laura says, and pushes  her empty milkshake glass to the side. “I think you know why.” Hayley meets her eyes, the pale blue like a clear sea. “Sorry,” she says again. “My therapist says I should stop being oblique, but, you know. It’s hard.”

The noise of the coffee shop seems to seep into the silence between them. Hayley’s hand seems alien, far away from the rest of her body. She has to make a conscious effort to slide it halfway across the table. Laura meets her their, turning their palms together and interlocking their fingers.

“I saw you at orientation week,” Laura says. Her fingers tighten around Hayley’s. “I thought, I don’t know.” She pauses, pushes her bangs to the side. “I thought we could be friends.”

“You could tell.”

“Yes. I don’t know how. I just saw you, and I knew. I knew we were similar.”

 

*

 

After Hayley finishes her coffee, she takes Laura back to her apartment for the first time. It’s nothing fancy, just a little studio. She doesn’t have much in the way of furnishing, she spends most of her time on her computer, anyway.

“Wow,” Laura says when she sees it. “I’ve never seen anyone with three monitors before.”  
Hayley laughs. Laura takes her shoes off at the door, sheds her jacket, and bounds onto the bed. “This is way cooler than my dorm.”

“It’s okay,” Hayley says, but she can’t help the grin that almost hurts her cheeks. She pours water for them from her filter jug, and hands one to Laura.

“Tell me what you do,” she says, her eyes gleaming over the rim of her cup.

“I, um, I search the internet,” she says. “You know the deep web?”

“No.”

“It can be bad. Really bad. Other stuff, too. Sometimes I report it to the FBI. And sometimes, I don’t.”

“I want to help,” Laura says. There’s no hesitation. She leans forward, fingers tight on her water glass.

“I’ve been doing this for a while,” Hayley says.   
“How long?”

She can’t help shifting her weight from one foot to the other. “A while.”

Laura nods. “How do you pull it off, though? Do you use a decoy? I mean, you’re small, but you, uh, you look.” She falters to a stop.

“Old?”

“Yeah, ancient,” she says, and laughs. Hayley gives her a soft knock to the shoulder, and Laura gasps, dipping her fingers in her glass and flicking them at her.

“It’s a thing I can do. It’s like acting, I guess. And they’re always eager to believe. I have to act, now. I didn’t before.”

Laura leans back, puts her glass down on the bedside table. “I want to see. Can you do it for me?”

“Yeah.”

Hayley turns around, runs her fingers through her hair, cracks her neck, stretches it from side to side. She settles into it, and it rushes up into her with the clutch of familiarity. It takes a few seconds; it’s harder to do for Laura. Laura knows her, knows her face. She’s not some salivating, anonymous man, whose eyes only catch on what they want to see. She turns back.

“Oh, fuck,” Laura says. “Shit, Hayley. Oh, stop it, please.”

She lets it fall away again, and Laura reaches out to her, hugging her around the middle. “I’ve never seen anyone do anything like that before.”

She strokes Laura’s hair without meaning to. She smells like mint and shampoo. They stay in the comfortable silence for a few minutes more, until Laura releases her, her hands brushing against her to smooth out the wrinkles in her shirt. Hayley can’t help shivering at the light touch.

Things go a little faster from there. They order a pizza. While they wait for delivery, Hayley introduces Laura to her system. She leans over her in the computer chair, one hand resting on her shoulder, at times she strokes the back of Hayley’s neck with her thumb, and once or twice her hand closes, painfully, against Hayley’s skin.

She had a top three list; it’s painful easy to link their usernames to their real-world identities. When they drop personal information, they’re not thinking of someone who might comb through it all with a needle and thread, sewing each fragment together, piercing through their identity like skin.

There’s a Chinese term for it: _human flesh search engine._

It only takes a few days between initial contact and when they ask her to meet. She has to delay a few days, tease it out with reluctance crossed with innocence, to make it seem real. Laura  comes in after her test in one of her subjects they don’t share, and immediately falls asleep on Hayley’s bed while she’s chatting with the guy. She looks pale and tired, dark smudges under her eyes, and for the first time Hayley wonders if she made the right decision in opening up to her. But Laura wanted it so much, laughing, always positive. You need a bodyguard, right? She had said, pulling herself up to her full height. They’d hashed out a plan, something simple. When he brings Hayley back to his apartment, she’s going to be the concerned neighbour. And when he opens the door to her repeated knocks, they’ve one. Once the door is open and she’s inside, it’s easier than anything that Hayley has ever tried. Laura is strong, stronger than Hayley expected in almost every way. She’d forgotten that she goes to the gym almost every day, but the way Laura’s muscles stand out when she holds the man down so Hayley can put the pills in his mouth is an instant reminder.

Laura finds his stash of pictures in a filing cabinet in his study, her mouth a red slash, her jaw tight. They argue for a few minutes about where to put them, but when they leave, Laura’s hand is so tight on hers that she thinks she might bruise.

It doesn’t even make the local paper.

 

*

 

Having Laura with her is like finally coming into balance. She can be practical when Hayley is impulsive. They try to keep spontaneous, sporadic. They drive for five hours during spring break and Laura books them into a hotel. It’s only when she walks into the room, her duffle bouncing off the doorframe, that she realises there’s only one bed.

“I should have said something,” Laura says, and she’s a bit ashen. Hayley pulls her close, slings an arm around her waist and leans her head into her shoulder. Laura turns into her, pushes the door closed behind them. Hayley has to get on tiptoes and put her face up, and Laura has to lean down, but when their lips meet it doesn’t matter. Hayley’s cheek is wet when she pulls away, and there are tears caught in Laura’s eyelashes, but she’s laughing.

“I’ve wanted to do that since the first time I saw you,” she says. She reaches for Hayley’s hand, locks their fingers together. She falls asleep that night in the circle of Laura’s arms, and in the morning the plan goes flawlessly. They work together in harmony, from the moment the man reaches out to run his fingers along Hayley’s arm, to the moment where Laura drops the hairdryer into the bath.

On the drive back, Laura drives while Hayley slides her sunglasses on and winds the window down to let the wind ruffle her hair. Laura puts on Taylor Swift, and waves Hayley’s hand away when she goes to change it.

“I like it.”

Her sunglasses make everything seem amber and liquid. She leans back, easing some of the tension out of her neck. Laura sing along, loud, but not off-key.

“Admit it,” she says, after a few songs. “You like it.”

“No,” Hayley says, and Laura’s face falls. “I like _you_.”

The sun is high and yellow as they race down the highway, each car fading into a blur of colour and sound as she falls asleep. And yet, in the back of her mind, even though the sky is blue and cloudless, there’s a rumble of thunder that whispers _you can never get them all_. She wants to balk at that, to fight it, but she knows it’s true. She can never get them all.

But she can try.

 

 


End file.
